1. Field of the Invention
Exemplary embodiments of the present invention relate to a method and apparatus for transcoding a web page to be displayed on a mobile terminal.
2. Discussion of the Background
With the development of mobile communication and wireless Internet technologies, web users increasingly want to view web pages on mobile terminals, such as mobile phones, as well as monitor screens of desktop computers. However, web pages provided over the Internet are generally adapted for display on desktop computers. Accordingly, the web pages may not be appropriately displayed on a mobile terminal since the mobile terminal does not have sufficient capabilities to fully display complex web page content.
In order to allow an Internet web page to be displayed on a mobile terminal, a transcoding technique has been developed that can modify a web page to contain primarily text information excluding mobile image information or the like among varied web page content.
Herein, the term “transcoding technique” means a method of enabling web pages to be viewed on a mobile terminal. For example, when a web page is displayed on a mobile phone or the like, which may be limited in terms of CPU speed, memory capacity and screen size, an image is reduced or the web page is divided into segments in order to provide the web page to a user in a suitable state.
Since a web page often cannot be fully displayed on a mobile terminal, the web page may be divided into a plurality of segments when displayed on the mobile terminal. Thus, when a user selects ‘Next Page’ or any one of sequential page indicators, such as, for example, ‘1, 2, 3, 4, 5’ at a lower side of a terminal screen, a selected section of the web page is displayed on the screen.
FIG. 1 is a view of a screen of a conventional mobile terminal on which a web page is displayed.
Referring to FIG. 1, only a portion of the web page is displayed on the conventional mobile terminal.
A user may click on ‘Previous Page’ or ‘Next Page’ at the lower side of the screen of the mobile terminal to view other portions of the web page.
However, since the conventional mobile terminal does not display information about the structure of the whole web page, a user cannot find where currently displayed content is located in the web page.
Thus, since the user can neither know the structure of the web page nor easily find desired content. Thus when viewing the web page on the screen of the mobile terminal, the user cannot achieve the same level of satisfaction as when viewing the webpage on a desktop computer monitor.
Korean Patent Laid-open Publication No. 10-2004-0038458 discloses an invention, entitled “Web contents transcoding system and method for small display devices” The invention relates to a method and system for converting a web page adapted for display on desktop computers to be efficiently displayed on a small-sized terminal.
However, this publication merely discloses a technique of dividing the whole web page into a plurality of segments to be displayed on the small-sized terminal and does not provide information about the structure of the web page to a user. Accordingly, the user cannot grasp where current content is located in the web page.